The Revenge of the Rubber Ducky
Rehabilitating a hated screenwriting trope
While “accidentally” watching Below Deck last week,1 I noticed that pretty much every cutaway interview follows the same pattern. A crew member will stare down the lens with their big, baleful eyes and sweepingly declare that their (entertainingly) questionable behaviour was caused by an unresolved childhood conflict.
“My father was away a lot working, which is why I never bother putting any effort in.”
“My step-mom wasn’t nice to me, which is why I’ve cheated on my last three partners.”
I’m being uncharitable. Their linguistic jiu-jitsu is more sophisticated than that. By pointing to an open formative wound, they’re able to reframe their actions as perfectly admirable (or, at least, worthy of sympathy).
“My father was away a lot working, so now I make sure I have time to be there for other people rather than being obsessed with my job.”
“My step-mom wasn’t nice to me, so I just feel the need to protect myself by not letting anyone in.”
Battle-hardened cynics who would Never Go to Therapy™ will dismiss this as the narcissism of modern youth. “Main Character Syndrome,” they’ll declare, angrily waving little sticks. But we movie nerds know something the cynics don’t. The urge to use a slice of the past to explain the present is nothing new. Screenwriters have been grappling with it for decades.
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In 1995, director Sidney Lumet bemoaned what he called “rubber ducky” characterisation. By this, he meant the writerly compulsion to provide a neat historical explanation for a character’s “psychological truth.”
“Someone once took his rubber ducky away from him, and that’s why he’s a deranged killer.”2
Lumet despised the rubber ducky. It treats the audience like an idiot. It cheapens a character’s motivations. It tells, rather than shows. As he put it:
“A character should be clear from his present actions. And his behavior as the picture goes on should reveal the psychological motivations. If the writer has to state the reasons, something’s wrong in the way the character has been written.”
We can smell a rubber ducky from a mile off. We roll our eyes at yet another clichéd flashback, misty-eyed monologue or unnecessary origin. Yet, they remain ubiquitous in modern movies. It’s a rubber ducky world, and we’re just living in it.
Origin stories that tell us why feared villains like Cruella de Vil, the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Joker turned evil? Rubber duckies!
Prequels that reverse-engineer a Founding Moment for every character quirk, like how Han Solo got his name or Willy Wonka likes chocolate? Rubber duckies!
‘Elevated’ horror stories where the REAL baddie is a traumatic event in the protagonist’s past, not the guy in a pig mask slicing people up with a machete? Quack quack.
Just this year, a procession of rubber duckies waddled across our screens, from Brad Pitt’s smoking wreck of a backstory in F1 to the latest Mission Impossible’s attempt to retrofit a Rube-Goldberg machine of causation through the franchise.
It’s tempting to blame this all on lazy Hollywood screenwriting. But the fact that rubber duckies keep showing up should tell us something. There’s more to them than meets the eye.
The reason we find rubber duckies in our movies is the same reason we find them in our reality TV. They are how we make sense of our lives.
The world is noisy, random, and nonsensical. Shit happens. Without the ability to simplify chaos into cause and effect (i.e., to tell stories), we’d be rudderless.
has been writing about this for years:“Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain. We’re surrounded by a tumult of often chaotic information. In order to help us feel in control, brains radically simplify the world with narrative.” 3
We are all rubber duckers. We tell ourselves stories about our past to better understand our present. We self-mythologise. We select moments from our messy history and canonise them as Significant Turning Points, even if they didn’t feel that way at the time.
Have you ever found yourself thinking, “If it weren’t for X, I wouldn’t have done Y?” If so, welcome to the flock. Rather than being the therapy speak of some hapless Gen Z’ers, or the lazy crutch of a Hollywood that’s lost its touch, rubber ducking is a profoundly human way of making sense of the world. And, if you’ve got this far, you probably agree that there are few better places to explore that impulse than through cinema.
Lumet wrote about how he always tried to eliminate the rubber ducky from his stories. The more interesting question is: how can we incorporate it?
Author
distinguishes between stories where characters make things happen (“choice plots”) and stories where things happen to characters (“no choice plots”).“What really distinguishes the choice plot is free will […] The no-choice plot tends to feature simple powerlessness in its deterministic passivity.”
We like choice plots because the protagonist has agency. They make decisions and reckon with the consequences. When rubber ducking fails, it is because it saps this drama. If everything in a character’s present is preordained by an event in their past, they become passive. Powerless.
This is why we scoff at the redundancy of, for example, a Cruella De Vil origin story. The past flattens the present. She becomes less interesting as a result.
The rubber duckies worth keeping are the ones that deepen a character’s agency in the now. The ones that shift from an objective past (“here’s the event that caused this”) to a subjective present.
Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him, so he dresses up and beats up bad guys. Quack quack. But in a great Batman story we’re not seeing the inevitable outcome of a childhood incident. We’re watching his continuing struggle to fight against it. His actions are a constantly evolving response to his perception of the past. The action, the juice, is all in the present day.
I’m not usually a Superman guy, but his latest outing offers a surprisingly sophisticated example of this (spoiler klaxon!). At first, James Gunn seems to dish up a routine rubber ducky. Superman acts heroically because a video from his dead parents tells him to. Yawn. Then comes the rug pull. A hidden second half of the recording reveals his parents actually want him to subjugate Earth. Superman’s understanding of his backstory collapses. Now, he must choose how to respond. Who is he? That’s the stuff of drama!
One last example, this time from the real world. In The Last Dance, it is revealed that Michael Jordan sometimes invented stories about rivals slighting him, just to fuel his competitiveness. In other words, he rubber ducked himself. He narrativised his past to change how he acted in the present. Good shit! This is the kind of backstory that belongs in our movies.
Ironically, it’s also the type of rubber ducky used by our Below Deck crew. Roll our eyes though we may, there is something psychologically fascinating and, dare I say it, cinematic, about how they use their histories (real or imagined) to rationalise their present-day behaviour. Perhaps they are better storytellers than we think.
By “accidentally” I mean “deliberately,” and by “last week” I mean “for the last three years.”
Making Movies; by Sidney Lumet
The Science of Storytelling; by Will Storr
I like Kate's story of why she stopped believing in Santa, in Gremlins. It's simultaneously a subversion of this rubber ducky thing; an absurd shaggy dog joke; and a revealing moment for her character: She tells this insane story in the middle of an insane situation, and she's obviously sharing a traumatic memory. But it soon becomes clear that she took completely the wrong "lesson" from her experience, which suggests that all is not right with Kate. This may explain why she continues to work her bartending job when the bar's full of gremlins. She's a little detached.
"By “accidentally” I mean “deliberately,” and by “last week” I mean “for the last three years.”"
Ha!